The host is Jack Burns and the Musical Guest is Santana

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

I am now officially almost four percent done with my epic exploration of every Saturday Night Live episode. So it’s probably worth noting that up until this episode, Lorne Michaels’ deathless comic institution was officially known as Saturday Night. 

That’s because the name Saturday Night Live was already taken by a uniquely ill-conceived, ill-fated sketch and variety show starring funnyman Howard “Chuckles” Cosell and some young people destined for bigger and better things, most notably Bill Murray and Christopher Guest. 

Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell was canceled after a single season. Saturday Night became Saturday Night Live, and the rest is history. 

Saturday Night didn’t officially become Saturday Night Live until its forty-first episode, deep into its second season. 

The new moniker did not debut on a particularly auspicious episode. The first episode officially known as Saturday Night Live, was hosted by comedian, comedy writer, and Muppet muckety muck Jack Burns. Burns was a journeyman comedian who famously was in a comedy duo with George Carlin and then Avery Schreiber. 

Burns worked on The Muppet Show and was a writer, announcer, and sometime performer on Saturday Night Live wannabe/rival Fridays, where he was part of a famous/infamous staged fight where Andy Kaufman broke character to complain about the show’s lazy reliance on pot humor. 

Though he has some impressive credits, particularly The Muppet Movie, Burns was a comedy journeyman who did a journeyman job as host. He did not distinguish or embarrass himself. 

Burns’ sense of humor was a little conventional and a little square by Saturday Night Live standards. For example, his monologue is largely devoted to discussing formative experiences with priests and nuns and other fixtures of a Catholic education. 

There’s a whole corny world of Catholicism, nun, and priest-based comedy that I will never get, both because I am Jewish and also because it’s just not that funny. Without that cheap but potent buzz of recognition, these gags tend to die a natural death. 

For writers, performers, and producers, the great thing about recurring characters is that they get a huge introductory laugh from a studio audience conditioned to go crazy for the catchphrases and the kooky characters the show has made famous. 

Sure enough, the introduction of Dan Aykroyd’s Beldar, Jane Curtin’s Prymat, and Laraine Newman’s Connie in “The Farbers Meet the Coneheads” gets a huge Pavlovian burst of laughter from the studio and from me. 

As the title suggests, the sketch finds a suburban couple, played by John Belushi and Gilda Radner, coming face to face with everyone’s favorite visitors from Romulak. 

The Coneheads make no effort whatsoever to hide their true alien identity beyond pretending to be from France. There’s a wonderful moment in the sketch when Belushi articulates the subtext of every sketch when he says that the Coneheads being from France, “explains everything” when it really explains nothing. 

Belushi and Radner make for wonderful comic foils to these fan favorites from another planet, and the sketch ends with a bang when the nerdy husband brings out a cone-shaped hair dryer, and the Coneheads leap out of a window in terror. 

Burns acquits himself nicely as a hardass Marine performing a marriage ceremony for a pair of jarheads, played by Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, with the same aggro intensity with which he torments and terrorizes his underlings. 

Some ideas just aren’t funny, often because they’re predicated on dodgy wordplay. “The History of the Squatters” is a painful sketch predicated on the fact that squatting refers to people living in a place they do not own or rent or have legal ownership or control over, but it also refers to an uncomfortable position where you’re low to the ground and your arms and legs are near each other. 

The sketch is a history of squatters who are all physically squatting in addition to doing the other kind of squatting. It's yet another sketch that made me think of the gag in The Simpsons where Krusty the Clown hosts Tuesday Night Live and, when a sketch about the “Big Ear Family” gets a chilly reception, he grouses that the sketch goes on for twelve more minutes. 

That episode was actually written by John Vitti, who, along with fellow The Simpsons legends George Myer and John Swartzwelder, wrote for Saturday Night Live’s notorious 1985-86 season. 

Musical guest Santana stops by to perform “Black Magic Woman” and “Europa” and to do something that is not often done on the 30 Rock stage: jam. This is because of the nature of the bands booked for the show, but it’s also because the nature of live television means everything must be timed in an exact fashion, and the essence of jamming is that it could, and sometimes does, go on forever. 

Unfortunately, that is also true of many sketches on Saturday Night Live, but the writers and producers knew that, in a comedy world with no sure things, sketches involving popular recurring characters could be counted on to get big laughs. That’s knowledge the show has used and abused over the course of its extraordinary, extraordinarily checkered forty-nine-year run. 

Grade: B-

Best sketch: “The Farbers Meet the Coneheads”  

Worst sketch: The History of the Squatters 

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